Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

But I had learned much from him, and I took Joan to the Berkeley. She dressed herself up, and, though her mission was an anxious one, she was glad to be there. As she sat on the other side of the table, I thought her face was becoming better looking as she grew older; she had lost the radiance of happy love, but the handsome structure of her cheekbones was beginning to give her distinction; it was a face in which character was showing through the flesh.

She went straight to it.

“I’m very worried about Roy,” she said, and told me her news. Houston Eggar had recently got a promotion, after steady and resolute pushing; he had left Rome and been sent to Berlin as an extra counsellor. Late in January, he had written out of the blue to Lord Boscastle about Roy. He said that he was presuming upon his wife’s relationship to Lord Boscastle’s family; he knew that Roy was a friend of theirs, and the whole matter needed to be approached with the utmost discretion. I thought as I listened that Eggar was in part doing his duty, in part showing his natural human kindness, and in part — and probably a very large part — seizing an opportunity of getting into Lord Boscastle’s good books. If he exerted himself, he could be valuable to Eggar’s career. But thoughts of Eggar soon vanished as Joan described his report. It sounded factual, and we both believed it.

Roy, so Eggar said, was being a great social success in Berlin. He was being too great a social success. He was repeatedly invited to official and party functions. He was friendly with several of the younger party leaders. With some of them he had more influence than any Englishman in Berlin. “I wish I could be satisfied,” ran Eggar’s letter, which Joan gave to me, “that he was using his influence in a manner calculated to help us through this difficult period. It is very important that Englishmen with contacts in the right quarters should give the authorities here the impression that they are behind the policy of HMG. Calvert has gone too far in the direction of encouraging the German authorities that they have the sympathy and understanding of Englishmen like himself. I can give you chapter and verse of several unfortunate remarks.”

Eggar had done so. They had the tone of Roy. Some of them might have been jokes, uttered with his mystifying solemnity. One or two had the touch, light, first-hand and grave, which Joan and I had heard him use when he was most in earnest. And Eggar also quoted a remark in “very embarrassing circumstances” about the Jewish policy: at an august official dinner, Roy had recklessly denounced it. “You’re a wonderful people. You’re brave. You’re gifted. You might begin a new civilisation. I wish you would. I’m speaking as a friend, you see. But don’t you think you’re slightly mad? Your treatment of the Jews — why need you do it? It’s unnecessary. It gets you nowhere. It’s insane. Sometimes I think that, whatever else you do, it will be enough to condemn you.”

It had been said in German, and I did not recognise the phrases as typically Roy’s. But the occasion was exactly in his style. It had given offence to “important persons”, and Eggar seemed as concerned about that as about the other “indiscretions”. All his reporting seemed objective, and Joan and I were frightened.

We were not simply perturbed, as Eggar was, that he might commit a gaffe at an awkward time. Eggar obviously thought that he was a frivolous and irresponsible young man, who was flirting with a new creed. Eggar was used to Englishmen in society who for a few months thought they had discovered in Rome or Berlin a new way of life, and in the process made things even more difficult for a hard-working professional like himself. To him, Roy was just such another.

Across the table, Joan and I stared at each other, and wished that it were so. But we knew him too well. We were each harrowed because of him and for him.

Because of him — since we were living in a time of crisis, and it was bitter to find an opponent in someone we loved. Both Joan and I believed that it hung upon the toss of a coin whether or not the world would be tolerable to live in. And Roy was now wishing that we should lose. It was a wound of life. We had taken our stand, we each knew we should not change: but this positive news of Roy weakened our will. For we should be the last people to dispose of him as frivolous. Our doctrinaire friends would no doubt feel convinced that he was nothing but a rich man out to preserve his money: to us, that was a crassness that broke the heart. No one alive knew his vagaries as deeply as we did. We could not pretend to disregard anything he truly believed. We thought his judgment was dead wrong; but anything he felt, came from the depth of his sense of life: anything he said, we should have to listen to.

We were harrowed for him. We could only guess what he was going through, and where this would lead him. But he was without fear, he was without elementary caution. He had none of the cushions of self-preservation which guard most men; he did not want success, he cared nothing for others’ opinion, he had no respect for any society, he was alone. There was nothing to keep him safe, if the mood came on him.

“Ought I to go and see him?” said Joan.

I hesitated. She was distracted for him, with a devotion that was unselfish and compassionate — and also she wanted any excuse to meet him again, in case the miracle might happen. Her love was tenacious, it was stronger than pride, she could not let him go.

“He might still listen to me,” Joan insisted. “It will be difficult, but I feel I’ve got to try.”

Nothing would put her off. That was the advice she had come to get. Whether she got it or not, she was determined to go in search of him.

I heard another, and a very different, account of Roy a few days later. It came from Colonel Foulkes, whom I ran into by chance when I was lunching as a guest at the Athenaeum. Oulstone Lyall had died suddenly at the end of 1938 (I was interested to see in one of the obituaries a hint of the Erzberger scandal: it seemed now that the truth would never be known) and Foulkes had become the senior figure in Asian studies.

“Splendid accounts of Calvert,” he said without any preliminaries, as we washed our hands side by side. The Oriental faculty at Berlin University had decided, Foulkes went on, that Roy was the finest foreign scholar who had worked there since the 1914–18 war. “They’re thinking of doing something for him,” Foulkes rapped out. “Only right. Only right. Subject’s cluttered up with old has-beens. Such as me. Get rid of us. Get rid of us. That’s what they ought to do.”

He had also heard that Roy was sympathetic to the régime, but it did not cause him the slightest concern. “Great deal to be said for it, I expect,” said Foulkes, briskly towelling his hands. “Great deal to be said for most things. People ought to be receptive to new ideas. Only way to keep young. Glad to see Calvert is.”

He had himself, it then appeared, just become absorbed in theosophy. It had its advantages, I thought, being able to overtrump any eccentricity. He remained curiously simple, positive and unimaginative, and he took it for granted that Roy was the same.

I had a letter from Roy himself early in March. He invited me to spend a week or two of the vacation with him in Berlin. He seemed acutely desirous that I should go, but the letter was not an intimate one. It was stylised, almost awkward, almost remote — usually he wrote with liquid ease, but this invitation was stiff. I suspected a purpose that he wished to hold back. There was nothing for it but to go.

I arrived at the Zoo station in Berlin on a snowy afternoon in March. I looked for Roy up and down the platform, but did not see him. I was cold, a little apprehensive; I spoke very little German, and I stood there with my bags, in a fit of indecision.